This movie about high school seniors who look and live like college seniors (no parent is mentioned, let alone seen, while seven teens spend the entire night cruising around New York City) has enough funny moments and charm to carry its light weight. The story concerns Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings) who accidentally fall in together one night while trying to track down the location of the performance of stealth band “Where’s Fluffy”. Nick is hung up on his ex-girlfriend Tris, while Norah is lonely and in search of love. It is more than a bit odd that Nick, a geeky Yugo-driving kid who plays bass in the otherwise gay band “The Jerk Offs” becomes the unattainable object of Norah’s affection, as Norah is intelligent, cool, hot, and rich (in roughly equal proportions). She is out of his league, not the other way around, so it took me a while to adjust to the movie’s premise which is that she is fighting for his attention. So too, even more oddly, is his hot ex. This rendered, for me at least, the story less interesting than the color and gags that decorate Nick and Norah’s night-long journey for Fluffy and each other.
Archive for October, 2008
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008Jason Jones in Wasilla
Monday, October 27th, 2008This has to be seen to be believed:
Religulous
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008Bill Maher’s take on religion is very funny until the last 2 minutes when, depending on the degree one accepts his central thesis, it becomes somewhat nauseating. That is because his central thesis is that religious faith is a dangerous mental aberration that must be abandoned if the human race is to survive. He backs this up with the whole-hearted conviction of billions of people who believe they will be going to a better place after death, and that the end of the world, as described in the Bible, is a good thing. Coupled with our ability to actually bring about the end of the world, you get the idea where the nausea sets in.
But for the most part, Religulous is a funny ride through the fringes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with significant forays into the mainstream cores of these faiths. Although I am an atheist, it is hard for me to imagine even the devout not laughing when Senator Mark Pryor (D, Arkansas) responds to Maher’s question about some of the ridiculous aspects of taking the Bible literally by plainly stating that no IQ test is required for membership in the Senate. The expression on his face right after he says that is worth the price of admission.
And, he exhorts those of us who are not religulous to come out of the closet. So here I am, out of the atheist closet.
Redistribution of Wealth
Friday, October 17th, 2008Some are getting up in arms over the idea that Barack Obama’s tax plan amounts to “redistribution of wealth”, a concept that is wedded in the American psyche to socialism which is in turn equated somehow with the Soviet Union. Here is the simple calculation I wish someone would present to the public. The annual U.S. federal budget is now $3.1 trillion. With about 300 million Americans, that amounts to $10,000 per American. The only way we don’t redistribute wealth on the federal level would be for tax to be a flat citizenship fee of $10,000 per person. After all, all people are given equal protection by the military, have equal access to the interstate system, have equal access to the products of federal scientific research. Let’s put aside for the moment that some federal programs are targeted. Not even Joe the plumber would argue that everyone should pay a flat fee of $10,000 instead of a percentage of income. If tax is anything other than a fixed dollar amount for each individual, then the government is by definition redistributing wealth. We are and have been “socialist” by this definition for a long time, and will continue to be. The only discussion should be over degree: how much more should a millionaire pay than someone on minimum wage?
A Planet By Any Other Name
Monday, October 13th, 2008What is a planet? This seems to be an embarrassing question for a planetary scientist to be asking, but since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) passed a resolution in summer 2006 defining a planet, it has become a topic of increasing discussion and some controversy. At the 40th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society being held this week at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, there was even a special session devoted to the topic.
Earlier in the week I attended a talk by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, at the University of Central Florida where he was visiting our research group. Stern made an eloquent case for ditching the IAU’s planet definition in favor of one that is more inclusive. Yesterday, at the DPS meeting here in Ithaca, I heard an equally eloquent argument by Stern’s colleague Dr. Hal Levision of the Southwest Research Institute defending the IAU definition.
The IAU definition says, in short, that a planet is an object that is large enough to be round and that orbits a star and which has “cleared” its orbit. Large enough to be round means, for all practical purposes, about 500 km in diameter. Stern would leave it at that. That is, he favors a definition of planet based on the intrinsic properties of the object independent of where it is in the universe and what effect it has had on other objects. With this definition, the geophysical planet definition, the Moon is a planet, as are Pluto, the large moons of Jupiter, many objects in the Kuiper Belt as well as Ceres, the largest asteroid. The geophysical planet definition makes no requirement on a planet orbiting a star instead of orbiting another planet or indeed drifting through interplanetary space. It simply must not be a star, which is defined as an object that now or in its past has undergone some form of nuclear fusion in its interior, and must be large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium (that is, roughly round due to the force of gravity overcoming its internal strength). With this definition, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of planets in our solar system, depending on the unknown population of large objects in the Kuiper Belt.
Perhaps the main problem with the geophysical planet definition, as pointed out by Levison at DPS, is that it does not provide a clean break between planets and non-planets. In any planetary system, including our own, there will be objects just smaller than the minimum size for hydrostatic equilibrium that are neighbors of “planets”. So, there could be a spherical object - a planet - in the Kuiper Belt, and another object virtually identical in every way and in nearly the same orbit, that does not meet the “round” criterion and so would not be a planet. This seems arbitrary.
The dynamical definition, the one adopted by the IAU, requires that the object gravitationally dominate its particular region of the solar system. The awkwardness of this definition is that if one could move Earth sufficiently far from the Sun, it would no longer have the gravitational influence necessary to clear its new much larger orbital zone and would not be a planet. Conversely, Pluto would be a planet under this definition if it were much closer to the Sun. The advantage to this definition is that if one looks at the distribution of objects in the solar system, taking into account their sizes and their orbits, there is a very clear break between “planets” and small solar system bodies and “dwarf planets” (the latter being objects that meet the round and star-orbiting criteria of the IAU, but not the orbit-clearing one).
To avoid the problem posed by this dynamical evolution definition (that, for example, Earth would not be a planet if further from the Sun, or in fact, if it orbited Jupiter), Levison proposes modifying the definition so that instead of having one based on clearing an orbit, it is based on not being part of a continuous size distribution of objects in its region of the solar system. Thus, Jupiter in the plot above is not the only object in its orbit (so it has not technically “cleared” its orbit), but there is no object near its size. With this size distribution definition, “planet” refers to objects that are distinctly larger than any other objects in their orbital zone. It also leads to a distinct group of 8 planets in our solar system.
Over the next several years, this question will probably be resolved by the evolution of common public and professional usage rather than new IAU definitions. In the meantime, though, it has provided some interesting discussion on the apparently basic topic of what it means to be a planet.
The Real McCain from Rolling Stone
Monday, October 6th, 2008Plausible Electoral College Tie?
Friday, October 3rd, 2008CNN’s web site has an electoral college map widget that lets you set states red or blue. Starting with the 2004 results, I changed New Mexico, Colorado, and Iowa to the Obama column (all leaning that way based on polls), and changed New Hampshire to the McCain column (a tossup). This amazingly plausible electoral result produces a 269-269 tie.
In the result of a tie outcome like this, the electors themselves do not necessarily adhere to their pledged candidates. However, if they do, the race is decided by the House of Representatives, but not by individual votes from each representative: each state gets one vote. California with its 53 representatives gets the same say as Wyoming with its 1. Because Republicans control the more numerous small states and Democrats the less numerous, heavily-populated, states, this would result in a McCain presidency. More recent and complete analyses here and here make it seem that a tie would more likely end with Obama (or Biden!) in the White House.